Better to be Wrong than Right?

Walter Laqueur is the author of, among other books, Weimar, A History of Terrorism, Fascism: Past, Present, Future, and The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union. His newest book, Optimism in Politics and Other Essays, is due out from Transaction in January.

How many pages of print need be devoted to an event
that amounts to no more than a small footnote, if that, in the history
of British academic life? In the case of the dueling protagonists of Isaac & Isaiah,
a new book by the British historian and novelist David Caute, the
unfortunate answer is: quite a few. Luckily, there is much else of
inadvertent interest in the story Caute tells.

Both Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) and Isaac Deutscher (1907-1967) were
born to Jewish parents in Eastern Europe, but otherwise they had little
in common. Berlin, who arrived in England as a schoolboy, eventually
became a central and much celebrated figure of the British intellectual
and academic establishment and was knighted in 1957. Deutscher, who
arrived in his thirties, established himself within a few years as a
well-known biographer and political commentator and a self-proclaimed
exemplar of the human type known as the “non-Jewish Jew,” a term he may
have coined.

Caute presents his chosen pair as the “most influential scholars of
cold-war politics.” This is not accurate. Berlin, whose many interests
included Russian social and political thought, was not and never claimed
to be an expert in Soviet politics—the field that preoccupied Deutscher
almost entirely. Nor was Berlin ever a political activist, while
Deutscher, by contrast, had been a member of the Polish Communist party,
later a Trotskyite, and thereafter a faithful fellow traveler and
well-wisher of the Soviet Union. Finally, although Deutscher acquired a
remarkable mastery of the English language—in a 1967 review of one of
his biographies, I noted not only his forceful style but his unique
ability to make his protagonists come alive—whether he was a scholar by
inclination or accomplishment has remained a matter of controversy to
this day....